I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
Mr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
ELECT YOUR PEOPLE'S POLICE by Norman Spinrad If something isn't done, and done fast, a civil war in the United States is just a shot or a Molotov Cocktail away. But how and by who? If there is one American who could stand up before the protesters and be listened to it is surely the one and only former President of the United States, Barack Obama. Live before the largest crowd possible and of course well televised. What should he say? He should speak the hard truth to the leaderless protesters that what they are doing is counterproductive to their own confusion of diverse and general causes which if even possible would take decades of legislation to accomplish. What is needed immediately is a strong significant and reachable demand. Demand that the head of all police departments in the United States--cities, towns, st...
This is more or less self-explanatory, written in real-time on my laptop, first at home, then from a hospital bed, and posted in real-time to a group email of friends and on Facebook, hence raw and repetative, but I believe, useful and honest in original form except for spelling check. I think AN AGNOSTIC'S PRAYER may be of free-standing interest itself independent of the personal story which finds me writing this, having created this blog, still recovering, but, not 100% cured and in for some more chemotherapy, so I will post that separately too. March 23 I have been diagnosed with stomach cancer and told that it is presently inoperable due to involvement of a mesentery lymph node, and my only chance to even live out the year is to undergo prior chemotherapy of one kind or anothe...
QUARANTINE by Norman Spinrad If it wasn’t the best of times, at least it wasn’t the worst of times, or something like that, which is the opening line of a novel called A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and it seemed like this would be only a tale of one. Back in the day before the Quarantine, Manhattan island was the heart and soul and pocketbook of New York City, to the extent that New York could have been said to have all three, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Broadway and 42nd Street, and all that jazz. When you saw a movie or a TV show or an ad featuring New York, the Big Apple was Manhattan, not anything in what some visiting Californian must have dubbed the “Outer Boroughs,” the moral equivalent of Anaheim or Eagle Rock as far as a Hollywood wise guy was ...
DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN The Bluegrass Song Just in time for the impeachment! Whoever turns out to be the Democratic candidate for President is welcome to use it as their theme song. Free of charge! Pro bono! DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN click here
VITAMIN C VERSES CORONAVIRUS Why I've not yet read this anywhere I don't know but that is why I'm duty-bound to do it myself: Vitamin C will be effective against the Coronavirus, personally, and collectively. Vitamin C promotes the body's creation of Interferon which is key to the strength of the immune system. Everyone should take at least 2000mg of Vitamin C, 1000 in the morning, 1000 in the evening, some say another 1000 mid-day. This is not curative, this is cautionary, keeping your immune system running at maximum. If you start to suspect that you may be feeling early symptoms take 1000 mg of Vitamin C an hour until your urine turns bright yellow, which means that your Vitamin C is at maximum and you are pissing away the rest. This will not always stop the infection but it frequently will. I am not making this up, it was discovered and elucidated by Linus Pauling, a Nobel class biochemist. Decades ago, I suffered chronic urinary infection like many men. When I ...
THE 21ST CENTURY SHAMAN Alternate Medicines and the Scientific Method by Norman Spinrad Written over a decade ago as a proposal for a book that never got written but all too pertinent to the era of the coronavirus There are many medical systems on this planet, some of them ancient, some of them new, more of them that not based on metaphorical systems. Only “Western” or “alliopathic” medicine is based on rigorous science. But many of the traditional non-western systems cure some conditions cure some conditions but not others. Many of these cures work in practice, but not in theory. That is they do work, but not for the reasons the theory behind them conte...
EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS SEE THE LIGHT? Read it on Christianity Today: by Marc Galli In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment. The typical CT approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible. We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage. That said, we do...
AN AGNOSTIC’S PRAYER by Norman Spinrad agnostic (common definition): someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in God gnosis:literally knowledge gnosis mystical and philosophical definition: direct experience of the transcendent ...
I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteMr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
ReplyDeleteThanks foor sharing
ReplyDelete